Character guide

Yelena Andreyevna

major

Also known as Yelena

Yelena is the professor's young wife, newly arrived at the country estate and already suffocating in it. She confesses she is bored to death and doesn't know what to do with herself, while Sonya gently urges her to help with the estate, teach, or tend the sick. Her idleness is contagious: Vanya trails her like a shadow and Astrov, once a monthly visitor, now drives over daily. She matters because her presence quietly rearranges everyone's desires.

Sonya

major

Also known as Sofya Alexandrovna, Sonetchka, Sonya Uncle Vanya

Sonya is the professor's daughter and Vanya's niece, the one who actually keeps the estate running while others brood and complain. She reminds Yelena that she and Uncle Vanya used to go to market themselves and sell the flour, and she can't understand how anyone could simply not help. She loves Astrov, who barely notices her, and her steady labor forms the moral counterweight to the household's idleness. Her patient devotion shapes the play's ache.

Ivan Petrovitch Voynitsky

major

Also known as Vanya, Uncle Vanya, Voynitsky, Ivan Petrovitch

Vanya manages the estate his brother-in-law the professor abandoned for scholarship, and the sacrifice has curdled into resentment. He mocks the professor's twaddle and grumbling, snaps at Sonya when she reproaches him, and circles Yelena with a desperate, half-romantic restlessness, calling her his friend while Astrov teases him about it. His fury at a life spent for someone else's comfort drives the play's central confrontation. He is the wound the household keeps pretending isn't there.

Mihail Lvovitch Astrov

major

Also known as Astrov, Doctor Astrov, Mihail Lvovitch

Astrov is the doctor who has served this district for over a decade, aging visibly under the strain of endless calls and epidemics. He tells Marina how spotted typhus once left him working all day without food, then a patient died under chloroform and he was conscience-stricken as if he'd killed him on purpose. He wonders whether future generations will remember the road he and others are beating out for them, and Marina answers that God will. His weariness and his stubborn idealism make him the play's most clear-eyed figure.

Alexandr Valdimirovitch Serebryakov

supporting

Also known as Serebryakov, Alexandr, the professor

Serebryakov is the retired professor whose scholarship the estate has quietly funded for years, now returned to the country and miserable in it. He wakes Yelena at midnight to complain of pain, fears he has angina, and rails that everyone hates the sight of him, that he is a corpse while she is young and wants life. He insists he has earned the right to be cared for in his old age, even as his self-pity exhausts everyone around him. His demands force the household's buried resentments to the surface.

Marya Vassilyevna Voynitsky

supporting

Also known as Marya Vassilyevna, Marya, Voynitsky

Marya Vassilyevna is Vanya's mother, devoted to her son-in-law the professor and eager to discuss his latest pamphlet even as Vanya sneers at it. When she notes that the professor is attacking what he himself maintained seven years ago, Vanya calls it nothing awful and tells her to drink her tea, but she insists on talking. Her loyalty to the professor sharpens the irony of Vanya's sacrificed life. She embodies the household's habit of venerating the wrong man.

Marina

supporting

Also known as Marina Timofeyevna, Marina Speckly

Marina keeps the samovar, the knitting, and the household's small rituals running while the educated folk around her argue about wasted lives. She is the one person Astrov admits he is fond of, and her plain reply that God will remember what men forget lands on him with unexpected weight. Her unhurried, unjudging presence sets the play's tone of endurance against its restless self-reproach.

Ilya Ilyitch Telyegin

supporting

Also known as Telyegin, Ilya Ilyitch

Telyegin belongs to the household's margins — fed, tolerated, and largely ignored by the family whose table he shares. His compulsive cheerfulness and reflexive self-deprecation mask a man who has lost his own place in the world and clings to this one. He matters as the play's quiet measure of what genteel poverty and dependence do to a person's dignity.

Vera Petrovna

minor

Vanya's deceased sister and Sonya's mother, mentioned in passing.

Pavel Alexeyevitch

minor

A man briefly mentioned in conversation.

Jean

minor

A name mentioned by Marya in passing.

Labourer

minor

Also known as the Labourer

A worker on the estate, briefly referenced.

Batyushkov

minor

A historical figure mentioned in dialogue.